I am a senior editor at Forbes, covering legal affairs, corporate finance, macroeconomics and the occasional sailing story. I was the Southwest Bureau manager for Forbes in Houston from 1999 to 2003, when I returned home to Connecticut for a Knight fellowship at Yale Law School. Before that I worked for Bloomberg Business News in Houston and the late, great Dallas Times Herald and Houston Post. While I am a Chartered Financial Analyst and have a year of law school under my belt, most of what I know about financial journalism, I learned in Texas.

Canada Tried Registering Long Guns -- And Gave Up

One persistent suggestion in the post-Newtown conversation about gun control is a law requiring the registration of all guns, even so-called “long guns” like the rifle Adam Lanza used in the school killings. Lost in the discussion: Canada tried it and gave up, discovering like several other nations that attempting to identify every gun in the country is an expensive and ultimately unproductive exercise. Criminals, of course, don’t register their guns. And even law-abiding citizens tend to ignore registration when it comes to long guns mostly used for hunting and target shooting.

Fans say a central registry would make it easier for police to track down weapons used in crimes, and perhaps even make gun owners more responsible. With all the guns registered, owners could be held liable if their guns turn up at a crime scene and they failed to report them as stolen.

Universal registration drives NRA types nuts: The more paranoid among them fear it would be a tool for government agents to seize their guns, while the less so worry that anything that has been registered also can be taxed.

Maybe they shouldn’t worry. Universal registration has been tried in several countries, most recently in Canada. The program turned out to be far more expensive than expected and didn’t have any discernable impact on crime, perhaps because long guns are used so rarely by criminals in the first place. Canada’s gun homicide rate, according to the handy statistics at Gunpolicy.org, has held steady since the late 1990s.

Canada passed a strict gun-control law in 1995, partly in reaction to a 1989 shooting at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique with a semiautomatic rifle. The law required universal regulation of guns, including rifles and shotguns. Proponents said the central registry would give law-enforcement agencies a powerful new tool for tracking guns used in crimes. They also claimed it would help reduce domestic violence and suicide.

Registration will reduce crime and better equip the police to deal with crime in Canadian society by providing them with information they often need to do their job … Registration will assist us to deal with the scourge of domestic violence … Suicides and accidents provide another example … If a firearm is not readily available, lives can be saved. If registration, as the police believe, will encourage owners to store firearms safely so those impulsive acts are less likely, the result may be different.

The law passed and starting in 1998 Canadians were required to have a license to own firearms and register their weapons with the government. According to Canadian researcher (and gun enthusiast) Gary Mauser, the Canada Firearms Center quickly rose to 600 employees and the cost of the effort climbed past $600 million. In 2002 Canada’s auditor general released a report saying initial cost estimates of $2 million (Canadian) had increased to $1 billion as the government tried to register the estimated 15 million guns owned by Canada’s 34 million residents.

The registry was plagued with complications like duplicate serial numbers and millions of incomplete records, Mauser reports. One person managed to register a soldering gun, demonstrating the lack of precise standards. And overshadowing the effort was the suspicion of misplaced effort: Pistols were used in 66% of gun homicides in 2011, yet they represent about 6% of the guns in Canada. Legal long guns were used in 11% of killings that year, according to Statistics Canada, while illegal weapons like sawed-off shotguns and machine guns, which by definition cannot be registered, were used in another 12%.

So the government was spending the bulk of its money — about $17 million of the Firearms Center’s $82 million annual budget — trying to register long guns when the statistics showed they weren’t the problem.

There was also the question of how registering guns was supposed to reduce crime and suicide in the first place. From 1997 to 2005, only 13% of the guns used in homicides were registered. Police studies in Canada estimated that 2-16% of guns used in crimes were stolen from legal owners and thus potentially in the registry. The bulk of the guns, Canadian officials concluded, were unregistered weapons imported illegally from the U.S. by criminal gangs.

Finally in 2011, conservatives led by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper voted to abolish the long-gun registry and destroy all its records. Liberals argued the law had contributed to the decline in gun homicides since it was passed. But Mauser notes that gun homicides have actually been rising in recent years, from 151 in 1999 to 173 in 2009, as violent criminal gangs use guns in their drug turf wars and other disputes. As in the U.S., most gun homicides in Canada are committed by young males, many of them with criminal records. In the majority of homicides involving young males, the victim and the killer are know each other.

The bigger lesson of Canada’s experiment, Mauser says, is that gun registration rarely delivers the results proponents expect. In most countries the actual number registered settles out at about a sixth. Germany required registration during the Baader-Meinhof reign of terror in the 1970s, and recorded 3.2 million of the estimated 17 million guns in that country; England tried to register pump-action and semiautomatic shotguns in the 1980s, but only got about 50,000 of the estimated 300,000 such guns stored in homes around the country

Canada’s suicide rates don’t appear to have been affected by the gun law, either. The overall suicide rate fell by 2% between 1995 and 2009, according to Statistics Canada, but gun deaths only average about 16% of suicides and a decline in gun deaths was almost entirely made up by increases in hangings.

Some police officers also questioned the efficacy of the registry in protecting them on domestic-violence calls, since the registry was riddled with inaccuracies and didn’t say where guns are located, only who owns them. Either way, long guns are only involved in about 18% of female spousal killings in Canada. Knives account for 31%, according to Mauser.

There are problems with interpolating Canada’s experience to the U.S. First of all, the statistics suggest the two countries are vastly different on a criminal-culture level. Canada’s overall homicide rate is just 1.8 per 100,000, according to the database at Gunpolicy.org, versus 5.1 in the U.S. So we Americans kill each other at a much higher rate, period. (Before you condemn Americans as bloodthirsty, look at Russia: Its murder rate is 15 per 100,000!)

Canada’s gun homicide rate is also proportionally lower at 0.5 per 100,000, a rate that has held roughly constant since the late 1990s (versus a significant decline in the U.S. rate to 3.6). But Canada’s 173 gun homicides — many of them with pistols smuggled in from the U.S. — are little more than statistical noise on this side of the border, representing just 4 days’ worth of gun killings on American streets.

The fact is every country is different and rates of gun ownership versus homicides have almost no correlation with each other. (See this Mauser article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy for a chart illustrating the point. Russia’s (legal) gun ownership rate is a rock-bottom 4,000 per 100,000 citizens and the country has a murder rate exceeding 15; Norway’s gun ownership rate is 30,000 per 100,000 and the murder rate is below 1.)

The bottom line is there are sensible things the U.S. can do to try and curb gun violence, including following Canada’s lead and passing strict regulations covering who can possess handguns — and jailing anyone found with one illegally. I believe most gun owners would agree to personal gun licenses, since hundreds of thousands of pistol owners have already gotten licenses. Most hunters also grew up in a culture of strict regulation, where any passing game warden can ask to see your license and inspect your semiautomatic shotgun to make sure it has a plug limiting it to three shells. Any more and you lose your guns.

But Canada’s experience suggests focusing on the hardware instead of the shooter is an expensive and ultimately fruitless endeavor. I would be curious whether that country’s pistol registry has been more effective.

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A Licence is just another Tax, and the first ten amendments to the Constitution are called The Bill of Rights, not the “Bill of Permissions,” “The Bill of Suggestions,” or the “The Bill of Prohibitions and Government Powers.”

The entire Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, are inalienable Rights of every U.S. citizen, not mere permissions or privileges to be meted out, restricted, licensed, taxed, monitored or regulated by bureaucrats of the Nanny State. And they are not our only rights.

Amendment II: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The first part asserts an irrefutable justification for the Amendment to exist. A “well-regulated Militia,” like a well-regulated timepiece is one in properly functioning condition. It does not refer at all to the degree to which the government controls, limits, legislates or otherwise infringes upon the People’s right to keep and bear arms (nor does it EVER mention ‘hunting’).

This interpretation is confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary. “Regulated” has a definition from the time of the Revolution (b) “Of troops: Properly disciplined” and then “discipline” has a definition (3b) applying to the military, “Training in the practice of arms and military evolutions; drill. Formerly, more widely: Training or skill in military affairs generally; military skill and experience; the art of war.”

The second part of the 2nd Amendment plainly asserts not a power of the states or federal government, but a Right of the People — to keep and bear arms without ANY regulatory interference. As Lincoln explained: ours is a government Of, By, and For the People — not of, by or for the State, and certainly not of the federal government. The Amendment concludes by asserting that the People’s Right SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

The federal government is charged with the task of protecting and defending the rights of all American citizens, not to infringe upon them, not to circumvent them, nor to usurp, negate, ignore, repeal, or otherwise destroy those rights! All those guilty of doing so have blatantly violated the Constitution and their oath of office; they are enemies of us all and should be serving terms in prison, not in elected office.

Infringe: (Meriam-Webster’s) – An encroachment or trespass on a right or privilege. The encroachment, breach, or violation of a right, law, regulation, or contract.

Clearly, no law-abiding U.S. Citizen should EVER have to beg permission from the State to freely exercise his or her Constitutionally guaranteed and protected Rights; for any government to impose such a requirement is a blatant infringement upon those Rights. Any Federal, State or Local law that obstructs, restricts, charges a fee for, impedes or otherwise encroaches upon the People’s right to keep and bear arms, is by definition an infringement, it is unconstitutional and must be struck down!

All politicians who seek to infringe in any way on the rights of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms have violated their oath of office and should be forever expelled from public service. Those who do not understand this are too stupid or dishonest to ever be permitted to hold public office. Colorado just removed two such cretins. Unfortunately there’s no mechanism to prosecute and imprison the SOBs.

You want to talk about Canada, then ask yourself why does Canada has a Murder & Incarceration rates that are about 1/20th of the US? Or lets put it even more clearly: Number of KILLINGS in USA is 10 to 20 time HIGHER than rest of developed World. Not 10 to 20% HIGHER which would have been bad enough, but a stunning 10 to 20 time HIGHER. And on top of that number of People in Jail in USA is about 10 to 20 time HIGHER too.

WHY? What do these developed Nations have compared to US?

Countries that have MUCH LOWER Murder & Incarceration rates than US have many more Social Services & Safety Nets, they get much more support from their Governments, what Republican lunatics and US Media call “Entitlement”. In fact Republican lunatics and US Media call them the “Welfare State”, as if the number one job of a Government in today’s modern World is anything but “welfare” of its people.

If crime rates were related to poverty and economic dislocation, one would expect them to go up during the financial crisis but they went down. And the U.S. murder rate is a little less than 3 times Canada’s, not 10 to 20 times.

2nd, What I meant to say is that Murder rates in US are 10 to 20 times Higher on avg vs other Developed Nations which you can see via above list

3rd, I did not say Crimes rates are only related to poverty, but that in countries that have MUCH MORE Liberal policies than US, such as they have Government run Universal Socialized health care (NHS), they have MUCH LOWER Murder & Incarceration rates than US.

Murder rates in Europe and Canada are lower because of demographics, not guns. There are plenty of German-Americans, French-Americans, Italian-Americans and Norwegan-Americans. There are virtually no European African-American or European Hispanic-Americans (which are from cultures in Mexico, Central and South American, and the Caribbean, not Spain or Portugal).

Take out the murders from those demographics that do not exist in Europe, and the murder rate of the United States is 1.5 per 100,000, right in the middle of European rates.

Murder is culturally driven, the availability of guns has little effect.

Overall this is a good facts based article. However, the AR-15 pattern rifle is restricted in Canada and must be registered. Handguns are similarly restricted. Most rifles and shotguns are non-restricted and are commonly referred to as “long guns”. Restricted firearms are subject to more regulation than non-restricted.

As a Canadian ( and a gun owner) it was a drudge and PITA to get my rifles registered .. I owned 3 long guns ..We have in Canada a thong called an FAC ( firearms Aquisition Certificate) that is needed to purchase any gun or ammunition .. requires a police check and is good for 2 or 5 yrs .. Then you can buy any rifle you choose .. No hindrance to the law abiding but you can’t get one if you are a felon .. It remains interesting as a Canadian living in the US to see the outcry against “any” form of control over guns.. We license drivers to carry children in school buses but require extensive skill training and background checks before that license is issued .. yet the NRA feels that any person with the cash in hand should be able to walk out of a gun show with a fully automatic rifle and 10000 rounds of ammo .. There must be some reasonable ground available .. we register cars.. we even register ( license) a portable hot dog stand.. Interestingly, the “right to bear arms” was first written into law in England after king James tried to disarm the Protestants . they seem to have evolved over the past 300 years to a modern understanding that with the existence of a Police Force that right could be limited somewhat .. America seems unable to understand that what was needed in an unlawful frontier we don’t require in a modern society